If you have been using Google+ this afternoon/evening (depending on where you are), you may have experienced what looks to be one of the first major Google+ bugs; multiple email notifications.

Many users have taken to Twitter to voice their displeasure at receiving the notifications, especially those that have switched off email correspondance in their Google+ settings. Whilst many have been receiving a handful of emails, many have received over 50 messages alerting them that a friend had added them to a Circle:

Google+, I just turned off notifications today. Why did I receive 30 emails about the same person adding me to a circle?

Gmail accounts are starting to resemble something similar to this (thanks @dustinbrewer):

The cause it not yet known but we have contacted Google to find out the cause. In the meantime, Twitter user Daniel Obenshain has said that turning off notifications and re-enabling them again will fix the issue.

We will update the article as soon as we receive a response.

UPDATE: Google+ chief, Vic Gundotra has just posted an apology for the bug, which he says lasted for 80 minutes.

Please accept our apologies for the spam we caused this afternoon.

For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications. Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes.

We didn’t expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly, but we should have.

Thank you for helping us during this field trial, and once again, we are very sorry for the spam.